Janitorial work always has been under-appreciated. But cleaning up shit tends not to be high skill work.

> Janitorial work always has been under-appreciated. But cleaning up shit tends not to be high skill work.

the latter is a non-sequitur, IMO. work that causes that sort of personal injury should be well compensated, regardless of the skill level. it takes a lot of a person. we should try our best to make that person whole again, or to not take so much from them.

I used to work there, and I built tools for these workers. Every one of the other engineers that I knew had nothing but respect for them, and everybody recognized that it was important work.

Even in Phoenix, yes, I think $28k is being underpaid for this job, but you can't tell me they wouldn't also call them underpaid at twice the money, and take the opportunity to compare that salary to a Menlo Park salary.

Facebook takes a hands on approach to vendor management: many of these policies are agreed with vendors at contract negotiation stage, but even beyond that, many are set and enforced day-to-day by Facebook employees working as vendor managers.

The other thing to note (and this is true of most outsourcing arrangements) is that, while engineers may respect these people and wish to provide good tooling, they're kept at arms length by management in terms of communication channels. Outsourced workers don't have access to internal ticketing tools, aren't party to any internal meetings on tooling (even those at management level in the contracted company). Engineers can mean well but that means little if they don't have any means to understand the needs of these indirect employees.

See, for example, Apple's supplier code of conduct: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/

Consider for yourself: if you hired a contractor to remodel your house, and you found out that the contractor wasn't giving their employees bathroom breaks, would you simply shrug your shoulders?

Facebook makes literally billions of dollars, they could easily pay more and provide better support to these people. They simply do not wish to do so.

The use of "contractors" in general is a shell game of abject responsibility.

If not, I'm sorry for the mixup - I'm just guessing based on your username.

I don't think OP meant to disparage the good honest work, but really, if FB (as a company) did value the work, it'd be in-house, wouldn't it? There's too much opportunity for mangement to 'tone down' issues when metrics are shared between companies, whereas in-house there'd be no hiding from the problems.

That said, it's great to hear that you devs were very mindful of the problems that face these people. I certainly didn't not realise how bad it was, so kudos to all involved really.

It may even be possible to selectively blur only parts of images for some classes of content. For instance, a filter that blurs portions of the image that are vivid red. If the red blur is on a dinner plate, then it's probably just a plate of pasta with tomato sauce. If the red blur is where somebody's head should be, that's probably gore and witnessing even that could be disturbing. But I know I'd rather see the blurred version.